Thank you Gameloft for sending us the Deluxe Edition to review!

I had to rewrite the intro to this review a few times, because I came in swinging. Let me preface my remarks with a story. When I was a pre-teen, our family got a Gateway computer that sat in the family room. My parents were very, VERY strict on how much time I could spend playing video games, but were more lax with that time if it happened to be an educational game. I had just a few: "Logical Journey of the Zoombinis", "The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: Mystery of Mathra", and "Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time". That final title is essentially my only exposure to the crimson-coated villain, but I remember that game quite fondly. Fondly enough, in fact, to introduce my own children to it. Every line was voice-acted; there was colorful, cartoony graphics; and all of the villains were completely ridiculous, with the sole exception being Miss Sandiego herself, who stood out as being a particularly tricky adversary by comparison to the other members of VILE.

So imagine my surprise when the new game comes out and you play as Carmen Sandiego herself. Depending on the path the game wants to take, I could see that being a huge recipe for success: using your vast knowledge of world history and geography to stay one step ahead of ACME (the good guys in this series) and avoid capture, maybe even doing it in an antihero sort of way where you act as a vigilante to do good (what I understand they did with the Netflix series). Instead, in the new game, the game starts with the premise that VILE had been dormant for some time, and Carmen Sandiego herself was enjoying some R&R on the beach. When a top-of-the-line fighter jet goes missing, and it's clear VILE was behind it, Carmen springs into action, working with ACME against VILE.

This already shocked me. Carmen was essentially the head of VILE, or at the very least their most accomplished thief, right? So what happened in the intervening years that has her at the ready to turn on her former comrades and their organization? If there is some explanation in all of the other media, then none of it is explained here, which is already a misstep. One of the ACME agents is a huge fan of Carmen Sandiego's earlier exploits, having read all of her old "case files". When Carmen talks about her thievery now, she claims she only steals to return items to their rightful owners. And she didn't say it like she had turned over a new leaf; she says it like that was always her intention. Which, I would say anyone who's played an older Carmen Sandiego title knows that is a blatant rewriting of the story. And considering this ACME agent is constantly talking to Carmen about her past, it wouldn't be difficult to slip in some exposition for those of us out of the loop regarding what made her change her ways. Just a little backstory for those of us who aren't deep into the Carmen Sandiego lore, you know? All that being said, I will at least say that the overall narrative of the game was a little interesting, once I finally got to the end and saw where the story went. I just wish that Carmen's sudden jump to the good side was better explained or exposited.

All right, so the game already had one of my eyebrows raised for the story. What about the gameplay? I played Carmen Sandiego on PC, and I had a fair bit of trouble with my controller, so I spent most of the time playing on keyboard and mouse...or, rather, just the mouse. The entire game was playable just using the mouse (though keyboard movement or—when I did get the controller to work—joystick made certain actions much easier). Between that and some other gameplay choices I'll touch on later, it made the experience feel like it was just a mobile game. Turns out, the game was likely designed with mobile in mind, since Carmen Sandiego released for both Android and iOS later just last month.

Now, a Carmen Sandiego game that relies strictly on the mouse isn't exactly new. Most of the old games were, at most, 2D point-and-click adventure titles that were designed around teaching the player about history or geography. This game, however, is more of a repetitive "whodunnit" with a bunch of random (but also repetitive) minigames thrown in. See, in an old Carmen Sandiego game, you might be asked to embalm a mummy by clicking on a series of containers in the right order, or navigate across the ocean using real sailing techniques. In this game, you'll be asked to crack a safe by turning the knob until your special safecracker device blinks green, or hold the mouse button to sneakily follow behind someone and let go to hide, or click the mouse at the right time to avoid a deadly laser trap. In a few instances, you'll be dropped into a museum or geographically-important site to track something down, and you'll point-and-click Carmen around this 3D space to have her run around, looking for clues and talking to people.

So the gameplay loop is this: start a "Caper" that moves the story along (someone stole something). Carmen goes to the city where the heist happened and goes to 3 places in or near the city of historical or geographical significance to find clues about who performed the heist and where they went next. The player will use clues about the criminal to filter through the ACME database of VILE members to find which one was the thief in this specific heist and issue a warrant for their arrest; issue the wrong warrant, and you'll fail to actually capture them at the end of the Caper. Use clues about the criminal's next location to track them to one of three new cities in a multiple choice way. Follow the criminal until you track them to their current location and arrest them. Each Caper has a time limit, usually 5-7 days, and each place Carmen goes to takes time, so you need to be careful not to waste it by accidentally flying to the wrong place or by looking for more hints and details than you need to catch the thief. Once you've issued the warrant and found the thief, the same exact little cutscene plays where Carmen calls in that they've found the thief, and some ACME agents chase down someone in a trench coat, before the ACME chief interrogates them and locks them up.

Now, VILE's members are anything but subtle, with names like "Dee Cryptor" and "Heidi Seek", but the vast majority of the criminals Carmen will come into contact with are generic "thugs" on the street and randos from the ACME criminal database. These criminals are nothing like the over-the-top ridiculous characters from previous entries in the series, like Sir Vile or Buggs Zapper. There are some reappearances by some old faces, but they're the exception, not the rule. And I know VILE isn't subtle, but the nature of the clues you get is weird. You'll be talking to a disgruntled gardener whose flowers were ruined by the VILE thief, and he'll say something like, "Just before they stalked off, I heard them say they were headed to an airport with N in its code." Talk to the captain of a boat, and you'll get, "Before they hit the water, I heard them say they love junk food." You filter through the ACME criminal database using things like the criminal's hair color, eye color, food preferences, hobby, fear, and defining feature, but the way the NPCs talk to you about the clues you need are so detached from a normal conversation that it's bland.

When you're a dozen capers in, especially if you're doing one of the ACME Capers (Capers that don't progress the story, have pixelated graphics, and are basically just filler and a way to gain extra experience), you'll basically just click through the dialog without reading anything until you've collected as many clues as you can, then go and read the clues all at once. Every conversation becomes transactional: click repeatedly until they give me the clue I need, then move to the next place so I can finish this level. If that wasn't bad enough, sometimes you'll get dialog that doesn't make sense at all.

Carmen Sandiego always has her hacker friend, Player (yes, his name is Player; no, he is not you, the player, he has his own face and voice and identity within the game world) in her ear, helping her through each mission, except for one mission where ACME thinks that he is the thief and you are forced to rely on an ACME agent to help you out instead. During this Caper, Player is radio silent...except for automated messages when you get to the end of a level when he pops in and says "There's nothing else for you to do here." Would it really have been that difficult to replace the automatic messages with Carmen talking to herself or her ACME friend for that one level? There are other minor continuity issues, too, like Player being able to track the serial numbers on money that he had no way of having, or Player still calling you "Red" when playing the ACME Capers, where Carmen is actually a suspect herself rather than the person you are playing as.

Speaking of levelling up, both the main game and the ACME Capers have level requirements. These requirements are generally not difficult to reach just by playing the game...so long as you didn't want to stick to just the main game and skip the ACME Capers. The level requirements are set up so perfectly that, after a few main game Capers, you'll be at the right level for the next ACME Caper but too low for the next main Caper. So now you either have to replay an old Caper to grind for experience or go play the ACME Caper, which has no bearing on the story whatsoever. Between the main story and the ACME Capers, there are roughly 20 levels. There are also roughly 20 cities you can visit. Each individual city always has the same 3 historical/tourist landmarks to look for clues in. In each Caper, the thief always jumps to at least 4 cities across the globe. That means you'll be revisiting the same locations over and over and over.

So the gameplay is bland, and the story starts out rocky but gets better. How about the graphics? Remember when I said this game looks like it was designed with a mobile port in mind? That applies to the graphics as well. Carmen Sandiego is the most detailed character on the screen, and even then, that's mostly because she doesn't look like an original Lara Croft circa PS1 like most of the other NPCs. I don't mind the colorful, simplistic approach used on Carmen herself, Player, and most of the environments Carmen visits, but there are some characters and NPCs who look like they were ripped from an N64 cartridge, including the ACME chief herself, who is on-screen nearly every single Caper. There's a difference between simplistic design and laziness, and given that they could spend the time to make Carmen look "realistic" in that simplistic design but could not bother to give the same attention to a bunch of the other NPCs just feels lazy.

The music evokes a similar feeling. It's all background noise, barely better than playing with the sound off (which I did for several hours). Outside of the opening cutscene, nobody's lines have accompanying VO, just one or two-word phrases each character says at the top of each new dialog box. This is especially unpleasant in the final level, where there are long periods of dialog that auto-advance roughly in time with how long you'd expect the character to take to say that, but they stand there with their mouth closed and you just read it in silence. If it weren't for the voiced intro, maybe it wouldn't have bothered me as much, but it gives me the same feeling as the graphics: they put some effort into the intro, into Carmen herself, and then just stopped once you got into the meat of the game. It feels lazy, especially for a $30 price tag.

What's worse is that Gameloft wants to charge an extra $20-$25 for the DLC, which includes one extra ACME Caper-style Caper, a couple costumes that you can make Carmen wear, an art book, and a soundtrack. The art book is just the art from the game, such as it is, a scant 18 pages. The soundtrack, though? Surprisingly good. And then I realized that possibly none of the tracks on the soundtrack showed up during the gameplay. There were some really cool sounding songs in the soundtrack, and I can't recall hearing a single one while I was actually playing the game. It's bonkers to me that they included Carmen Sandiego's greatest musical numbers behind a $20 paywall and didn't even have any of them playing while you played the game.

Perhaps the only redeeming quality of the new Carmen Sandiego game is that it's stable. I had one level where I was sure that I had gotten the right warrant issued, but I ended up incriminating the wrong person, and the real criminal went free. Now, that could have just been an issue on my end; maybe I did something wrong when adding the filters, or I misunderstood a clue, but the game doesn't tell you what you got wrong or give you the opportunity to see who the real criminal was, so there's no way for me to verify that this wasn't a bug. There's also some issues using the mouse to scroll through the ACME criminal database; you're supposed to click and drag through the various options, but it will often snap you back to the first item.

As for morality, there's very little to report. Obviously, there's all the thievery, but most of this is done by VILE. The player does get tasked with picking both locks and pockets, but in every instance, they're stealing from the game's villains. The worst language I saw was a VILE thug calling someone a "wiseacre", and another calling someone a "sucker". There's some very mild violence, with Carmen kicking a thief in one scene, and another VILE henchman who uses paper shuriken to give people paper cuts and knock them out. A rogue AI begins threatening to "delete" disobedient henchmen, but it's never shown or stated that anyone was ever actually "deleted", though the henchmen are pretty scared. The one real object of concern for me was the "game events" that Gameloft runs. There was only one this year, and it was for Pride, with Pride-themed costumes to collect and drag queen NPCs. Whether there will be more in the future remains to be seen.

At the end of the day, $50 for the Carmen Sandiego Deluxe Edition is a steal...and you're the one being robbed. Even $30 for the base game is asking too much. Honestly, paying $5 for the mobile version feels like a more reasonable price tag. Despite being a slog, I finished everything in under 9 hours. And yet, after 9 hours of gameplay, getting the scant 10 Steam achievements without even trying, and revisiting the same 18 capitals and their various locales dozens of times, I can't remember a single new fact about any of those places. And that, for a Carmen Sandiego game, is perhaps the biggest crime of all.

-maestro_dana